A week ago, President Donald Trump announced a panel discussion titled the “Saving College Sports Roundtable,” with attendance expected from across the sport. The agenda was simple: what’s going wrong in college football? The meeting took place on Friday. Now, with a single promised executive order, President Trump is threatening to upend the entire landscape of college athletics, leaving the NCAA and its member institutions in a state of high alert.

“I will have an executive order within one week, and it will be very all-encompassing,” President Trump said. “And we’re going to put it forward, and we’re going to get sued, and we’re going to see how it plays, OK. But I’ll have an executive order, which will solve every problem in this room, every conceivable problem, within one week, and we’ll put it forward. We will get sued. That’s the only thing I know for sure.”

Given the current state of college football, a decision like this was inevitable. The people present in this meeting, like Nick Saban and Urban Meyer, have explicitly called out the changing landscape of NIL for the past few years. Just last month, the portal window saw players leaving their teams for money, teams tampering with college athletes, and the influence of agents. The former Alabama head coach, Nick Saban, was the first to address it in the meeting.

“I think we need to come up with a system,” Saban said. “And we obviously have to do it with the president’s leadership and also Congress, probably, whether it’s antitrust legislation or whatever it is, to allow student-athletes in all sports, including women’s and Olympic sports, to enhance their quality of life while going to college.

“But still provide [an] opportunity to advance themselves beyond their athletic career. Which is what the philosophy of college athletics and getting a college education has always been about.”

Saban also argued that student-athletes now treat the sport like a job and no longer focus on their education. The pay-for-play model has attracted students who just want to earn money. They don’t really care about their degree anymore. In the case of Luke Ferrelli, we have seen players leave lucrative deals, even after they have already started classes at a school.

On top of that, the brand-new revenue-sharing system explicitly allows students to get their money directly from their schools, which doesn’t seem fair. In the meeting, former Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer also voiced his concern about this.

“That’s cheating,” he said. “Donors put money in a pot. It’s distributed to the players through coaches and managers. That’s not allowed. Not supposed to do that. That’s pay-for-play.”

Organizers scheduled the meeting for an hour but allowed it to stretch to nearly two, while reporters stood in the back of the room throughout. Notably, the only major group absent from the discussion was the student-athletes themselves. However, Donald Trump later addressed their absence and explained why the organizers did not include them in the meeting.

Donald Trump on the absence of current student-athletes from the table

Last week, when organizers announced the meeting, the absence of any current student-athletes raised a few eyebrows. The debate made sense, as current athletes could have explicitly defended their standpoint on this topic. And how the short 15-day transfer window made it very difficult for them to decide on a proper landing spot. But Trump addressed their absence head-on.

“They’re very well-represented,” Trump said. “You know why? Because people like Nick Saban and Urban Meyer, all of the people that I know in the room—and the people probably I don’t know—they all care very much about the student-athlete more so than they care about themselves, so I think they’re really here. In that sense, they’re represented very well here.”

Both Nick Saban and Urban Meyer have more than two decades of coaching experience. They have seen the landscape of CFB change before their eyes. Moreover, Saban addressed this situation earlier when officials asked him to lead a presidential commission on college sports alongside Cody Campbell, who was also present yesterday. But Saban turned it down because he just wanted a discussion.

However, do they really represent student-athletes? The head coaches were part of the system that had earlier failed to make the latter a part of the financial ecosystem of college football.